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Infosec 2013: A lack of security development and technology transparecy harms users

A failure to write secure code comes from the problem of not being able to compare technologies and vendors not disclosing the source code of their technologies.

Speaking to SC Magazine at the Infosecurity Europe conference in London, Dinis Cruz, principal security engineer at Security Innovation, said that there is no way to quantify security technology, as there is no standard metric to compare and more trust is needed.

He said: “The problem is technologies are created to move the vendor up the Gartner magic quadrant but there is nothing about how secure your product is and vendors at conferences like Infosecurity Europe are selling security software, but if you ask how secure their software is, how their security development lifecycle works, they will not tell you.

“We want to see an improvement in application security and want to write secure code and there is not enough driving the market, and a lot of people have a negative impact as there is more complexity associated with more technology.”

Cruz said that secure code is not impossible to write, but it is the difference between building a shack and a house, and building something good with no foundation. Cruz said that "you can build a bank as fast as you can build a restaurant, but where do you put your money?"

“Your customers cannot have any say in how secure technologies are and don't know the difference,” he said.

“If you want to protect your identity, then from a security point of view, it is more expensive to write a secure password system. You do not store your stuff in the cupboard, you put it in a safe.”

He later said that security architecture is about development and testing, and if you do not do automated tests, how can you test how secure your code is? “It is about secure code versus security features, you buy a technology for billions of pounds and then spend millions on application security,” he said.

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